Michael I. Rostovtzeff
1870–1952
He was also an expert on the history of South Russia and Ukraine, and the art and archaeology of Dura-Europos. Rostovtzeff began study of the ancient world with a thesis on Pompeii; his M.A. thesis covered the history of tax farming; his doctoral dissertation was a social and economic history of Rome from lead tesserae. The collapse of the Romanov empire and the triumph of Leninist bolshevism, apart from determining his view of the Roman empire, also drove him from Russia in 1918. He spent two years at Oxford; in 1920, after proving he was neither a Jew nor a Communist, he was offered a chair at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he remained for what he termed the happiest five years of his life. At this time he wrote seven chapters of the Cambridge Ancient History. In 1925 Rostovtzeff became Sterling Professor of Ancient History and Classical Archaeology at Yale, where he published his two greatest works: Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (1926) and The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World (1941), both of which left an indelible mark on the practices of ancient history.
In 1927 he undertook and directed the Yale excavations at Dura-Europos, which had a profound and lasting impact on the composition of the Classics department for the next few decades.
The Rostovtzeff lecture
Professor Rostovtzeff’s widow, née Sophie M. Kulezycki, bequeathed a generous sum to the Classics Department for the promotion of research in archaeology and ancient history. Part of this fund is used to support the visit of a leading figure in Ancient History each year around Rostovtzeff’s birthday in November. The Rostovtzeff lecture is an important public lecture at Yale in the general field of Ancient History. The lecturer also meets informally with faculty and students during his or her visit to the university.
2008 Nicholas Purcell, Oxford University
Romans in the Middle: Between Class, Status and Geography
Purcell is a fellow of St. John’s College and CUF Lecturer in Ancient History in the Faculty of Classics, Oxford University. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2007. Mr. Purcell is an expert on the ancient Mediterranean and is perhaps best known for his monumental study, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, co-authored with Peregrine Hordern (Oxford University Press, 2000). In his work he uses archaeological evidence alongside literary and documentary evidence to explore the social, economic and cultural history of the Greeks and Romans and their neighbors. His work especially stresses the longues durées, blending archaeological findings with other data, and insisting that the different themes of history, such as culture, politics, societies, economic behavior, ideas, institutions, must be studied in close association.
Purcell has a special interest in the ancient city of Rome and its Italian setting; in the cultural significance of games of chance, the rôle of women in the Roman imperial family, landscape gardening, and the emperor's resemblance to an actor on the stage; and in the production and consumption of wine and the socio-economic significance of the villa.
2009 Ian Morris, Stanford University
“What is Ancient History?”
Morris is Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor in Classics and Professor in History at Stanford University
He began his career as an archaeologist and historian of ancient Greece, studying early texts and excavating sites around the Mediterranean Sea, but in recent years he has moved toward larger-scale questions and an evolutionary approach to world history. He has written or edited eleven books, among which are Archaeology as Cultural History: Words and Things in Iron Age Greece (Wiley-Blackwell, 2000). From 2000 through 2006 Professor Morris directed Stanford University’s excavation at Monte Polizzo, a native Sicilian town of the seventh and sixth centuries BC. His most recent book, Why the West Rules …For Now (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, forthcoming 2010), asks how geography and natural resources have shaped the distribution of wealth and power around the world across the last 20,000 years and how they will shape our future. Morris’s ongoing projects include a book on slavery and globalization, a study of western civilization co-authored with historian Niall Ferguson of Harvard University, and a volume of the forthcoming Cambridge History of the World.
more about Rostovtzeff’s life and writing
- The Rostovtzeff Project
- Bowersock, G. W. Rostovtzeff in Madison in American Scholar, Spring 1986, Vol. 55/3, pp. 391–400.
- Calder, W. M. III, “Rostovtzeff, Michael” in W. W. Briggs, Jr., ed., Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists, Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1994, pp. 541-547.
- Momigliano, Arnaldo. M.I. Rostovtzeff in Studies on Modern Scholarship. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Pp. 32–43.
- Reinhold, Meyer. Historian of the Classic World: A Critique of Rostovtzeff, Studies in Classical History and Society (American Classical Studies; 45). New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. 82–100.
- Shaw, Brent D. Under Russian eyes,” The Journal of Roman studies, Vol. 82 (1992), pp. 216–228.
- Wes, Marinus A. Michael Rostovtzeff, historian in exile: Russian roots in an American context (Historia-Einzelschriften; 65). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990.
- ________. "The Russian background of the young Rostovtzeff, Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, Vol. 37, No. 2 (1988), pp. 207–221.
- ________. "The Correspondence between Rostovtzeff and Westermann. A Note on Gaetano De Sanctis", Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, Vol. 42, No. 1 (1993), pp. 125–128.
more about Dura-Europos
- The Excavations at Dura-Europos, Preliminary and Final Reports. New Haven: Yale University Press; Los Angeles: University of California Press; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1929–2001.
- Matheson, Susan B. Dura-Europos: The Ancient City and the Yale Collection. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1982; revised, 2001.
